#YouToo
It’s Thanksgiving week in the U.S. which brings to mind our terrible eating habits. Accordingly, if you are not already of a certain age and you live long enough, you will eventually be strongly encouraged by strangers to let them go spelunking in your ass.
They call it a “colonoscopy” to make it sound medical and gravely important, as though ignoring it could lead to your death—which it could, but only if you’re in the about 4% of Americans who get butt cancer. The spelunkers seem aware that this activity they’ve dedicated their working lives to is fairly horrifying and so they give you some Cosby-style drug so you won’t remember them being there and poking around in your drawers. But what they really need is a drug that makes you unaware of the 24-hour preparation period leading up to the invasion.
If you know anyone who’s had a buttoscopy they’ll doubtless tell you, “The prep is the hard part!” That’s certainly true but fear not—everything is relative. If you’ve ever spent time hiding in a wooded area from law enforcement officials with trained bloodhounds, licking the dew from leaves to quench your raging thirst, the prep for your colonoscopy will probably be a breeze in comparison. If, on the other hand, you’re a pampered American with an oral fixation and are used to eating several times daily, grazing on tidbits between meals, and drinking things more exciting than salty tap water, you might find the prep challenging.
Here are the basic rules: no “real” food the day before your procedure and nothing but clear liquids to drink, and then nothing to drink at all after midnight the morning of your appointment. (You’re not even allowed to lick the dew from leaves.) And, to add a degree of difficulty to the end of your prep day, before bed, you’re to drink TWO LITERS of water filled with Magic Crap Powder™. After the first few gulps, you’ll likely be questioning whether colon cancer can really be as bad as people say, but don’t indulge your self-pity because you’ve got another toilet tank full of liquid to go. You thought you were hungry and thirsty before you began this late-night ritual, but by the time you’re midway through the second keg of crap juice, you’re thinking you may never allow anything more solid than marijuana smoke to pass your lips again.
When the vile juice is finally gone you may feel relieved, but don’t get too comfortable with that feeling. You’re about to try to sleep with a belly full of liquid that is going to combine with everything you’ve eaten in the last month and come shooting out the other end at unpredictable intervals for the next several hours. Unless you can sleep strapped to a toilet, you’re probably going to have to change your pajamas and bedsheets by morning. Possibly even the bedroom curtains.
Your procedure will likely be scheduled for early in the morning because most people cannot wake up with dry mouth after a day of no food or sleep and not drink anything for several more hours without being physically restrained or committing a crime. But “early in the morning” for this kind of medical clinic is often 9:30 or 10am. For a person like myself who routinely gets up just before sunrise, that’s practically the middle of the day. By the time I actually got to the part where they offered me the charmingly named “twilight drug,” (you get to be a teenage vampire for the hour that you’re under but then you forget the whole thing) the only thing that kept me from killing someone was the prospect of living in the woods under the same conditions, trying to avoid the police. Luckily, they put me under moments before I strangled the technician.
You’re finished now and on your way home but it’s not over; you’ve still got quite a few more hours of fairly unpredictable explosions of gas and liquid to contend with. If the cops are still on your trail, the bloodhounds will be able to find you by sound without even using their noses.
And can we talk for a moment about this deceptive, sterilized term, “procedure”? I don’t know what they should call it but no-food-for-24-hours and a-stranger-shoving-something-up-my-ass-while-I’m-unconscious seems much more like a prison riot than a “procedure.”
I long for the day when these kinds of things are seen as barbaric relics of the past. I probably won’t live long enough to see it, but if reincarnation is a thing, in my next life I may be able to have a non-invasive scan that accurately detects looming issues within. I may be able to look back at colonoscopies the way we now look at leeches, trapanning, and the drinking of turpentine, all of which were once respected medical “procedures”.
Now, I know I’m going to hear from medical professionals who will chastise me for potentially talking readers out of a life-saving procedure. A friend of mine has made a career of working at a butt-spelunking clinic, in fact, and she’d likely be upset about this post. (Sorry, Katie!) The good news is, I don’t think she reads my blog so if you know her, please don’t mention it.
But if you are reading this, Katie, before you cook your wig, please keep in mind that I’m not telling anyone not to do it. I did it, knowing full well what I was getting myself into, and I’m glad(-ish) that I did. I now have a lovely sheet of glossy photographs of a part of my body I hoped I would never see, and permission from my spelunking provider that I won’t need to act out hiding in the woods overnight again for another ten years! That’s peace of mind.
So to be clear, I’m NOT telling you not to do this, but whenever I hear a kid lamenting about how they wish they could grow up faster so they can be an adult, I tell them about colonoscopies. It always gives them pause and sometimes it makes them cry.
P.S. The average cost for a colonoscopy in the US is $3000 but can go higher. In Mexico, in a high-rise, modern medical building with the same equipment and training used in the US, it cost $500, without insurance. Ah, the price of pro-capitalist propaganda.
And now with a clean bill of health, let’s see what Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons look like this week…
All transactions are recorded on the blockhead chain. (That’s a Bitcoin reference.)
Wayno features a pipe picture each week on his blog post and this week’s is of a MAD magazine artist you’re likely familiar with. Wayno included some scandalous stories about him that I’d not heard. Don’t miss it!
At least he’s not talking to his urologist.
I used an Internet cafe in Asia once that had similar reliability. I remember it taking three-to-five minutes to download a single email.
This one still makes me giggle.
Damn, I used to love sugary kids’ cereal! If only they’d never discovered how rotten they are for your health!
That’s the end of this week’s cartoon cruise, Jazz Pickles. We hope you have a lovely (American) Thanksgiving next week—if that’s your thing—and a trouble-free colonoscopy if that’s your thing. If you’re enjoying our cartoons and that we post them for free and without ads, please consider helping us keep it that way by visiting some of the links below! We’ll love you for it!
Until next time, be sure to check the credentials of anyone offering to put cameras or hoses into your backside.
BIZARRO SHOP Fun and cheap!
… Bizarro TIP JAR One-time or repeating. Your choice!
…Signed, numbered, limited edition prints and original Bizarro panels